The Great Beef Boondoggle : BEYOND BEEF The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture <i> By Jeremy Rifkin</i> , <i> (Dutton: $21; 304 pp.) </i>

In June, the world’s nations will meet in Rio de Janeiro for a global summit on the environment. Hordes of diplomats will wrangle over conflicting approaches to saving the planet’s ecosystems.

If Jeremy Rifkin is right, these people will be wasting their time. There’s an easy way, he says, to restore Mother Earth to health: Stop eating beef.

Rifkin is best known for his campaign against genetic engineering, which he thinks will lead to Nazi-style eugenics programs. Recently, though, he has been concentrating on the environment, especially that part of it anywhere near the family Bovidae . “A curious silence surrounds the issue of cattle,” he warns. His new book, “Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture,” is intended to shatter that silence.

Beef-eaters, Rifkin thinks, have a lot to answer for. In his view, the West’s uncontrollable fondness for steak is creating deserts, laying waste to forests, poisoning water systems, starving the poor, killing off native peoples, wrecking the atmosphere, expunging rare species, and abetting the forces of racism and sexism. It “might appear strange,” Rifkin admits, to “suggest that a person is committing an evil act” by going to McDonald’s and consuming a hamburger, but that’s just what he is suggesting. Forget about the wasteful wrapping and all that; it’s the burger that’s bad news.

Long ago, Rifkin claims, many people lived in a spiritual relationship with their bovine companions. Agricultural societies were egalitarian, matrilineal and ecologically aware--PC before PC, as it were. Then a bad element sprang up on the Russian steppes. They were called Kurgans. The first to breed horses to carry people, Kurgans set up “the first nomadic cattle empire in world history.” Ever in search of pastureland, Kurgans invaded Europe and the Mideast, introducing their cattle along with their utilitarian, capitalist mind set.

The Kurgans believed that “land was something to capture, possess, and exploit.” Soon everyone else did, too. This was all 6,000 years ago. According to Rifkin, things haven’t been right since.

The beef boondoggle didn’t really go out of control, though, until the days of Wyatt Earp. “Few Americans are aware,” says Rifkin, “that . . . Western ranchers conspired with British banking interests to colonize nearly 40 percent of the land mass of the United States for the creation of a powerful Euro-American cattle complex.”

It happened like this. Around 1800, the British ruling class, suddenly wealthy from empire, began breeding ridiculously fat cattle “to embody (its) new sense of self.” Lords and ladies ate the cows’ well-marbled flesh, “symbolically consummating their role as rulers of the world.” The masses slavishly adopted the upper classes’ “peculiar British taste” for fatty beef, Rifkin says, as “a means of securing passage into the British aristocracy.” (I swear I’m not making this up.)

To slake the demand for fatty beef, British bankers financed the extermination of the buffalo and the Native American, and their replacement by cattle. By 1900, Midwestern farmers, Western ranchers, British bankers and multinational corporations had formed a cattle cabal in what Rifkin calls “one of the greatest business transactions in world history.” Similar arrangements in the rest of the world led to the present situation, in which 1.28 billion cattle are “swarming over the great landmasses of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia like hoofed locusts.”

This is all so enjoyable that it seems practically boorish to point out that early agricultural societies were just as territorial and violent as any other human group (and maybe more sexist--the women did all the hard agricultural work and the men did hardly anything); that fatty meat is loved not only by scheming British bankers but also by ecological good guys like the Eskimos; that in any case the Western penchant for well-marbled beef is due not to its anthropological significance as a rite of social passage but because diners think it is more tender and flavorful than tough, lean beef; and that most British funds were used to build railroads, with cattle being an afterthought, well down on the list.

More irritating is Rifkin’s innumeracy. He says, for example, that 43,136 tons of U.S. beef were shipped to Britain between 1884 and 1886--an average of 28,760,000 a year. At that time the population of Britain was roughly 37 million, three-quarters of which was working-class and therefore, according to Rifkin, “largely excluded from the beef culture.” A few stabs at a calculator shows that the beef-eating population thus numbered about 9.25 million, and that for them per-capita beef imports were at most three pounds a year, enough for a couple of big T-bones. In other words, Rifkin’s own figures show that the vaunted Euro-American cattle complex played a tiny role in the British diet.

Similarly, “Beyond Beef” claims that by 1900, the “symbiosis” between grain production and beef “was nearly complete”; yet one page later Rifkin explains that just before World War II “about 5 percent of the nation’s beef cattle were being fed on grain.” The vast majority of cattle thus had nothing to do with the “grain-fed cattle complex,” which, despite Rifkin’s elaborate historical framework, did not exist until quite recently.

Fortunately, Rifkin is on more solid footing in the second half of the book, which details the environmental ruin caused by the West’s love of beef. The basic argument, familiar since Francis Moore Lappe published “Diet for a Small Planet” in 1971, is that it is foolish to grow crops, feed them to cattle and then eat the cattle; if people simply ate the crops to begin with, much less agricultural land would be needed to feed everyone, and the extra production could feed the hungry. Moreover, cattle grind through everything in their path, which means that they are rough on fragile environments. Idiotic government subsidies augment the waste in the whole business.

I rarely eat red meat for just these reasons, but Rifkin’s sloppiness and hyperbole still made my teeth hurt. Take his remarks on the fees that Western ranchers pay for grazing rights on public lands, which government studies estimate are as low as one-fifth the market rate. “No other constituency before or since,” he charges, “has been so completely subsidized by the American taxpayer.” Oh, really? Rifkin says ranchers now pay an annual total of $35 million. Multiply that by 5 to get the maximum market rate: $175 million. The annual subsidy is therefore $140 million. In the era of trillion-dollar S&L; bailouts, defense giveaways like the Seawolf submarine, import quotas on more fuel-efficient foreign cars, and outrageous water allotments to agribusiness, this is what Rifkin picks as America’s most egregious subsidy? And by the way, shouldn’t he mention, somewhere, that the number of U.S. cattle has fallen by 15% since 1983? Or that, far from being “curiously silent” about cattle, environmentalists have been trying to kick them off public land for years?

According to Publishers Weekly, Rifkin is launching a worldwide crusade to eradicate beef from the human diet. The stakes are high. “The elimination of beef,” “Beyond Beef” claims, “will be accompanied by an ecological renaissance, a grand restoration of nature on every continent. America’s Western range will come to life again. Ancient rivers will flow, their waters bathing and healing thousands of damaged riparian zones across the great plains. . . .

“In Central and South America, the dissolution of the cattle complex . . . will silence the familiar drone of thousands of machine saws cutting their way through the thicket of ancient forest ecosystems. . . . Countless species of plants, insects, and animals will be granted a reprieve from what once appeared to be a sure death at the hands of ranchers and multinational corporations. . . .

“In the new world that is coming, millions of human beings will voluntarily choose to eat lower on the food chain so that millions of others may obtain the minimum food calories they need to secure their lives. . . . A new species awareness will begin where the rich meet the poor on the descending rungs of the world’s protein ladder.”

Now, this is wonderful. A new Eden--just by turning vegetarian! Why worry about the population explosion, nuclear waste or the gap between rich and poor? We can solve everything by avoiding the meat counter! What a relief for those Angelenos who were worried about their cars. Folks can drive around all they want, provided they don’t stop at McDonald’s--just tell ‘em Jeremy said so.

Come to think of it, I hope he’s right.

Book Mark: For an excerpt from “Beyond Beef,” see the Opinion section, Page 3.